Welcome to a world where money matters. Where the gap between rich and poor has grown to a chasm. Where the moral certainties of the past are slipping away and the threat of apocalypse is never far from your mind. But this is not 2017. It is the world conjured by the 14h century poet William Langland in his surreal, hypnotic masterwork Piers Plowman.

Written almost 650 years ago, Piers Plowman enters the mind of a wanderer, Will, as he falls asleep in the Malvern Hills, dreams of a “fair field full of folk” and embarks on a quest to find Truth. This summer, a new site-specific theatrical production, Fair Field, reimagines this 7,000-line “poem of crisis” for the 21st century.

In the first of three original podcasts produced for the Guardian, Langland’s hallucinatory dreamscape is conjured through voices, texts and sounds that bring the modern and medieval together, revealing a society of inequality, political corruption and spiritual crisis that is uncannily like our own.